Split | 2016

A tour-de-force performance from James McAvoy as Kevin Crumb – also Dennis, Patricia, Barry, Hedwig and others – a man with multiple personalities, being helped by well-meaning but a tad too-trusting psychiatrist Dr Fletcher (Betty Buckley).

It’s an M Night Shyamalan film so, even though I’ll assume you watched it before checking the locations, I’ll try to tiptoe round the spoilers.

It’s not giving anything away to reveal that it’s filmed around – surprise! – the director’s home turf of Philadelphia, much of it at the Sun Center Studios on North Commerce Drive in Aston, southwest of Philadelphia. Shyamalan was one of the first directors to use the studio after it opened in 2011, for his sci-fi movie After Earth, with Jaden Smith.

It’s claimed to be the largest Mall in the USA. The area's curious name is derived from a local 18th Century tavern, called the King of Prussia Inn.

The three girls are abducted from the parking lot outside.

There’s another restaurant soon, as one of the girls, Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) begins a series of sinister flashbacks to her childhood.

When she’s seen being taken hunting with her father and uncle (in reality not much farther than Fairmount Park in Philadelphia), the three stop off at Fisherman Restaurant, 440 Schuylkill Road, Phoenixville, northwest of King of Prussia. Sadly, the place closed down in early 2019.

She studies the mysterious figures of Paul Cezanne’s masterpiece, Les Grandes Baigneuses (The Bathers), in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway. It’s a magnificent collection but now probably more famous (OK, thanks to people like me) as the place with the flight of steps on which Rocky trained.